Life after ventilators can be hell for coronavirus survivors

Life after ventilators can be hell for coronavirus survivors

“There are a lot of other dangers when we use mechanical ventilation,’’ says Richard Lee, interim chief of pulmonary diseases and critical-care medicine at the University of California at Irvine. “We have to sedate patients for them to tolerate a mechanical breathing tube in their lungs, and the longer you are in an ICU on sedation requiring a machine, all those other things — like decreased muscle tone and strength and the risk of hospital-acquired infections — increase.’’